Hierarchical Motion Control of Transfer Robots Considering Coverage and Collision Avoidance in Area with Obstacles

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control method for the motion of transportation robots with the aim of solving problems related to the transportation of cargo in the logistics/transportation industry by introducing transportation robots. Specifically, multiple robots simultaneously achieve transportation of cargo to a target position, avoidance of collisions with obstacles, and coverage of the area in a two-dimensional region with obstacles. At first, the administrator specifies a transportation or covering task for each robot as a global control. Then, one robot that is assigned a transportation task carries out the transportation of cargo while avoiding collisions with obstacles by local tangent bug-based motion control. On the other hand, the remaining robots without the transportation task continue to cover the region. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control method is verified by numerical simulations assuming a train station and the other for a shopping mall.